The Truth According to Blue

by Eve Yohalem

“Not those kinds of consequences.” Dad glanced at Mom. She hadn’t said a single word this whole time. “Big consequences. Consequences that reflect the seriousness of what you’ve done.”

  “Okay…” A sick feeling swirled in my stomach.

  “You’re grounded for the next week,” Dad said.

  I exhaled. A major setback, but Jules and I could handle it. Well, we couldn’t—not with Fitz out there getting closer to the treasure by the minute—but we would. Somehow.

  “While you’re home, you can clean out the basement,” Dad said.

  I almost groaned, but I stopped myself in time. Dad was using my punishment as a way to get him out of doing his job. But what choice did I have? “Okay.”

  I thought that was going to be it, but Dad kept going. “And, since you’ve shown us you’re not responsible enough to use it safely, no more boat for the rest of the summer.”

  “What?!” I jumped up out of my chair. “No, I—”

  Dad cut me off. “No more boat and no more Jules. She’s a bad influence.”

  “Jules is not a bad influence, and I have to use the boat!” My brain scrambled for some good reason that would change their minds. All I could come up with was “What about my science project?”

  “Mom or I will take you out on our days off.”

  “You can’t mean that!” I looked at Mom, who was still leaning against the counter with her arms crossed and her mouth pressed into a thin, tight line. Why wasn’t she saying anything? “I won’t be able to finish before school starts!”

  “We mean it, Blue. You should have thought about that beforehand. No boat, no Jules. I’ll be checking the engine hours every day, so don’t even think about sneaking out while we’re at work.”

  “Dad, can’t we—”

  He got up from the table. “No, we can’t. I have to get to work now. I’m already late. Do not, under any circumstances, see Jules or leave this house today.”

  Dad left but Mom stayed, watching me silently while the biggest dream I’d ever had and my whole future dropped dead.

  “Why didn’t you help me?” I pleaded.

  More silence. Seeing Mom so cold and closed-off terrified me.

  “I know I did a really stupid thing,” I said, “but why won’t you talk to me?”

  Her face argued with itself for a minute. Finally, she shook her head. “Talk to you? I can hardly look at you. Do you understand that last night you could have killed the person I love most in the world? What am I supposed to do with that?”

  My eyes welled up and over. All this time I’d been so worried about Mom and Dad not letting me search for the treasure that I didn’t think about why they wouldn’t want me to search—because they were afraid I’d get hurt, or even die.

  “I’m sorry. I’m really really sorry,” I said, my voice shaky.

  Mom waited for me to explain myself, but I couldn’t. Not when there was even a speck of a chance that I could figure out a way to get back on the water. I wanted to tell my mother the truth, but I wanted to look for the treasure more. Because as long as I had the hunt, I still had Pop Pop. And because I can’t go back to being Diabetes Girl. And Jules can’t go back to being Ed Buttersby’s daughter.

  I clamped my lips shut.

  Mom stomped out of the house and slammed the door behind her.

  I was slouched at the kitchen table, replaying Mom’s words—You could have killed the person I love most in the world—when Jules showed up. It was like she had ESP and she knew the second Mom walked out the door.

  “Obviously, my dad’s calling my mom today to tell her what a bad person I am,” Jules said as she helped herself to a can of seltzer from the fridge. “But meanwhile, he’s decided the problem is that I’m spoiled and I don’t know what real responsibility is, so every single day from now on I have to do chores.”

  I almost laughed. “Your punishment is chores?”

  “You have no idea. I have to make my bed—that’s not so bad. I can just pull the duvet over everything. But I also have to unload the dishwasher, which is so annoying.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Jules opened the can and slurped. “I’m child-slavery serious. I don’t know where anything goes in the kitchen. It takes forever.”

  Silence.

  She plopped down in the chair across from me. “Just kidding. I know it’s a totally lame punishment.”

  “I’m not supposed to see you ever again,” I said.

  “I can still see you, but you’re a bad influence,” Jules said.

  “You’re a bad influence too.” I took a deep breath and dropped the bomb. “I can’t use the boat for the rest of the summer.”

  Jules opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  “Before you ask,” I said, praying the lump in my throat wouldn’t turn into full-on tears, “the answer is no. There’s no way my parents are changing their minds. Gardiner’s Bay is too far to row. I can’t borrow someone else’s boat—they’d find out. And there’s nobody we can ask for a ride.”

  Jules’s shoulders curled. A piece of hair had come out of her ponytail and was stuck to her neck.

  Just so we could torture ourselves, Jules got the iPad out of her backpack and we logged on to the Windfall. There was nobody on the bridge.

  “They must be out on deck.” Or diving because they found something, which I didn’t say out loud but we were both thinking.

  We kept listening, hunched over the iPad, waiting for bad news. We were concentrating so hard that we didn’t hear the horn honking in the driveway until it stretched into one long blare.

  Jules and Otis and I ran to the front porch. Dad had swerved his truck in front of the house instead of parking in his usual spot by the garage. He was standing next to the truck, leaning into the open driver’s side window with his hand on the horn.

  “Dad?” I said.

  He whipped around, his face red. Then he saw Jules standing next to me and his face turned purple.

  Dad started to speak, stopped himself, started again, stopped. Finally, he took a deep shaky breath through his nose and said, “I’m getting creamed at work. I’m late, I’ve gotta ’rock a whole house in two days, and my best Sheetrock guy’s out getting an emergency root canal. Next thing I know, some guy in a suit shows up at my job site and gives me this.” He grabbed an envelope from his back pocket and slapped it against his other palm. “So I leave my hundred packs of Sheetrock, and I come home, and here you are with Jules.” He jabbed the air in our direction. “The person I specifically told you you were not allowed to see less than one hour ago!”

  I had never once in my life seen my dad this mad. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. Next to me, Jules was shaking.

  Dad held out the envelope. “Read,” he commanded.

  Otis followed me down the steps. My feet felt as heavy as two hunks of seventeenth-century ballast.

  I took the envelope from Dad without meeting his eyes. The letter inside was from a lawyer, and it was addressed to my parents. I read the words “cease and desist.” I saw the names Fitzgibbons and Windfall. I don’t speak legalese, but I knew that this letter told my parents that Jules and I had been in Gardiner’s Bay every day looking for something that we weren’t supposed to be looking for, that we had no right to be there, and that if we didn’t stop, somebody was going to jail.

  I looked up from the paper. Jules came down from the porch and stood by my side.

  “Start talking,” Dad said.

  I put my hand on Otis’s head for courage and began.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  True Fact: Sometimes the whole truth is easier to tell than one more lie.

  I told Dad everything, starting with my theory about the hound, explaining about the Dutch website, how Jules and I covered the territory, our inner tube–view bucket technique. Everything.

  Okay, maybe not everything. I didn’t tell him about installing the spy-cam that was still going strong on the Windfall, or about our t
rip to the Ruins. I’m not that insane.

  The whole time I talked, Jules was silent and still, and Dad did a weird thing with his hands where he kept clenching and unclenching them so they looked like Venus flytraps opening and shutting. When I finished he said, “So you’re telling me this whole time you’ve been chasing some pipe dream instead of doing your science project?”

  A blast of heat shot from my gut to my chest and straight out the top of my head.

  “It’s not a pipe dream!” I yelled. “Haven’t you listened to a single thing I said?”

  Dad smacked the hood of his truck. Otis whined—he doesn’t like it when anyone in my family fights—but Dad was so angry he ignored him. “It is a pipe dream, Blue! I spent my whole childhood stuck on a boat while my dad chased that dream instead of doing things like playing Little League while he watched in the stands. Why do you think I sold that VOC coin after he died? I didn’t want you growing up like I did. And now I find out you didn’t just waste your time—you could have died. And for what? For nothing.”

  Jules flinched when Dad said “nothing,” but the word just made me even madder. “I didn’t waste anything and it’s not for nothing. And I can prove it!”

  I blew past Dad and raced up the porch stairs.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Dad shouted.

  “To prove you’re wrong! Jules, let’s go. Otis, come!”

  The three of us ran inside and straight up to my room. I snatched the gear bag off my bed. Otis and Jules watched me with identical worried eyebrows.

  “Blue, wait, what are you doing?” Jules asked.

  I wrenched open the zipper and checked the contents of the bag, then slung it over my shoulder. “Showing him he’s wrong.”

  Jules and Otis followed me back downstairs, where Dad was rereading the letter and fuming in the front hall, the junk from the basement that he still hadn’t gotten rid of piled up between him and the kitchen.

  I yanked out the ballast.

  “What’s that?” Dad snapped.

  “What does it look like?” I snapped back.

  “A piece of junk you almost died for.”

  “Really, Dad? Really?” I stuck the ballast in front of his face. “You spent your whole childhood on a boat, and Pop Pop never told you what you were looking for? He never showed you any pictures? They had pictures back then, right? In books? You know those things made of paper with all the pages?”

  I was channeling my inner Jules. I had never talked to my dad that way. Never ever. But I’d also never been so mad.

  Dad snatched the lead out of my hand.

  “You think this is ballast?” he said, a hair quieter.

  “I know it is.”

  We locked eyes until Dad huffed and broke away. He ran his fingers over the ballast, held it up to the light.

  “It could be,” he said.

  “It is,” I insisted.

  “Even if it is, there’s no proof it has any connection to our family’s ship.”

  “Come on, Dad. How can you say that? Abraham Broen is right there in the living room, in our family bible. He was a carpenter, just like you, just like Abraham Broen the carpenter’s mate who sailed on the Golden Lion with the payroll.”

  Dad set the ballast on the hall table and turned his back to us, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Aw, crap,” he whispered. “Crap, crap, crap, crap.”

  “Dad?”

  “The thing is, Belly,” he said in a choked-up voice, “even if you’re right, you can’t do this. Not on your own. Not like this. This isn’t just taking a couple of water samples. It’s too dangerous.”

  I pressed my hand to my chest. “I swear I won’t dive anymore.”

  Dad turned back around. “It’s not just the diving, Belly. The whole thing is too dangerous for you. You’re not like other kids. You have to be more careful.”

  I wished Dad had punched me in the stomach. I wished the roof had collapsed on my head. I wished I had fallen down the stairs and broken my leg in three places with the bone sticking out. Because any of those things would have hurt less than what Dad had just said.

  “You’re right.” Jules took a brave step toward him. “Blue’s not like other kids. She tests her blood sugar at least four times a day when we’re on the water, and she thinks about every bite of food she eats. But she also taught me to drive the boat and how to navigate and how to think about currents and wind and red right returning.” Jules talked faster and faster, like she was trying to cram in as many words as she could before Dad stopped her. “She can tie a hundred different knots and rig an awning for Otis out of beach towels and fishing line. I don’t know a single other kid who can do any of those things.”

  “You’re great on the boat,” Dad said to me after Jules finished. “I never said you weren’t.”

  “I’m great with the diabetes stuff too,” I said. “Plus, I’ve got Otis.”

  Jules cleared her throat.

  “And Jules,” I said. “She’s the one who found the Golden Lion ship’s log, and her chef makes me sugar-free nut clusters.”

  “That taste like hay,” Jules said.

  Dad stared down at me for a long time. Otis stood between us like he was trying not to take sides.

  Finally, Dad shook his head. “There’s a cease and desist letter, and I’m not going up against Fitz Fitzgibbons and his lawyers.”

  “Mr. Broen—”

  “I’m sorry, Jules, but this isn’t one of your dad’s movies where the hero risks everything and saves the world and nobody we care about gets hurt. This is real life, where the playing field isn’t even and bad things happen. In real life you have to learn to live within your limits.”

  “Dad—”

  “Enough, Blue. Discussion closed.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  True Fact: Most of the time, the middle of the night is when bad things happen, like nightmares or stomach flus where you throw up so much that you have to sleep on the bathroom floor with a towel for a pillow. But every now and then, the middle of the night is when you find a teeny tiny glimmer of hope.

  I couldn’t sleep. How could I sleep? Jules and I got so close, and now Mom and Dad were taking it all away. My heart used to feel like a doughnut with a big hole where Pop Pop should’ve been. Now it was Swiss cheese with a hole for Pop Pop, a hole for the hunt, a hole for Jules.

  And a hole for Nora.

  She’d sent me another letter.

  Blue,

  Is everything okay? Not to play the pinkie-swear card or anything, but I’ve written you twice, and you did take an oath…

  I turned on the night-table light and pulled a notebook and pen out of the drawer.

  Dear Nora, Glad to hear camp is so great…

  Dear Nora, I’m sorry I haven’t written you back…

  Dear Nora…

  I threw the pad and pen on the floor and turned off the light. I missed the Nora who already knew everything about me. For the first time ever, I was afraid she might not totally understand me, that she might have to look up some of my words just like I had to look up some of hers.

  I lay in bed using Otis’s body as a pillow, tying and untying a monkey’s fist knot in the dark with a length of rope.

  “It’s not fair,” I said.

  Otis licked my head.

  “I hate it. Hate. Hate. It.” I rolled over and faced him. “I hate diabetes.”

  Otis put his chin on his paws and crinkled his eyebrows.

  “I know you get it. I don’t hate you.” I kissed his nose and rolled back over. “Just everybody else.”

  Otis and I went downstairs for a drink because kitchen water tastes better than bathroom water. Only the light over the table was on. Dad was sitting there with his laptop and some books. And the ballast.

  He looked up when we walked in. “What’s up, Belly?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Otis opened the fridge, and I got out the water pitcher. We’d get our drink and go. I wasn’t about to s
tick around and chat. Not after Dad had used my disease as an excuse to ruin the most—the only—important thing I’ve ever done or cared about.

  “I’ve been researching ballast,” Dad said, like we hadn’t had the biggest fight of our lives that very morning.

  I didn’t answer.

  “You might be onto something.”

  Not gonna answer.

  “This book I found in the basement has a picture of lead ballast from a seventeenth-century wreck that looks a lot like yours.”

  Still not answering, but willing to look at the picture. For research purposes.

  The ballast in the book looked pretty much identical to the ballast on the kitchen table. Of course it does. Because they’re made of the same thing and they came from the same century. Because the ballast on the table is real.

  “Tell me again why you think the ship of gold is in Gardiner’s Bay,” Dad said.

  I wasn’t going to answer, but Dad asked in this quiet, sad voice. The room was dark except for the one light hanging over the table. I was standing up, and Dad was sitting down, and his face looked like it hurt. Like he might cry. My dad doesn’t cry.

  So I told him again about the rock that looked like a hound and how Gardiner meant Garden of Eden, which meant paradise, which was why I thought the Great-Times-Twelves’ ship was a few miles from our house with the Golden Lion payroll still on it.

  “It’s our legacy,” I finished. “Pop Pop was right about the treasure being in Gardiner’s Bay, only he didn’t have proof. He was just going on a hunch and a family story. But now we know that Great-Times-Twelve-Grandpa Abraham was on the Golden Lion with the payroll, and this”—I picked up the ballast—“is proof the ship is still there.” I sat down next to Dad. “Please let me keep looking.”

  He sighed a big long sigh. “You can’t be sure the wreck is there, Belly. Pop Pop looked all over Gardiner’s Bay. He searched for years. After work, every weekend. Even in the winter.”

  Which meant that when Dad was growing up, if he wanted to spend time with his dad, he had to do it on a boat with his face in a bucket. I tried to imagine how that must have felt. None of the feelings were good.